Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Minor

Maximize the number of political appointees at DOL

Attempted

615 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Maximize hiring of political appointees. At its best, the Trump Administration Department of Labor worked with up to 150 political appointees. … The number of political appointees should be maximized in order to improve the political accountability of the department.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    Executive Order 14317 created Schedule G in the excepted service for "noncareer positions of a policy-making or policy-advocating character" that are normally subject to change at a Presidential transition, filling what the order calls a gap between Schedule C and Schedule Policy/Career. It is the government-wide vehicle for adding political appointees and applies at the Department of Labor as everywhere; no count of DOL political appointees is published, so nothing shows the number actually rising. Re-checked on 2026-09-06 against the Department's own Leadership Team directory, which is readable and lists about seventy-three named officials across twenty-seven agencies and boards, from the Acting Secretary down to deputy assistant secretaries: it names who holds each post and gives no appointment authority for any of them, so it cannot distinguish a political appointee from a career official and cannot be counted against the Quote's benchmark of "up to 150". Twelve of those posts are held in an acting capacity, including the Secretary's (Keith Sonderling, who is also Deputy Secretary), which is a fact about the roster rather than about the number of appointees.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • appoint ask: the roster (src/data/people.json) was checked first, as the plan requires. None of its 322 people carries a Current office at the Department of Labor, so the roster answers nothing here.
  • attempted and not partial: the order creates the schedule; nothing shows a DOL appointment made under it. The count the Quote uses as its benchmark — “up to 150 political appointees” — is published only in the Plum Book, whose next edition is due after the 2028 election, and on dol.gov.
  • Read 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07). dol.gov is not a wall to the full header set (see #1622’s notes). dol.gov/general/contact/leadership-team was read in full: it is the closest published record and it does not answer the question, because it lists posts and names without saying which are political. dol.gov/general/aboutdol/orgchart also opens. Recorded in the note rather than as Evidence, because a directory that cannot distinguish the class the ask counts evidences nothing about that count.
  • Order text read at govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-07-23/html/2025-13925.htm.
Action
appoint
Object
Political appointees at the Department of Labor
ID
1701